1 online resource (xiv, 52 pages) :

This year's winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Davis McCombs's Ultima Thule, which was acclaimed as "a book of exploration, of searching regard ... a grave, attentive holding of a light" by the contest judge, the distinguished poet W.S. Merwin. The poems are set above and below the Cave Country of south central Kentucky, where McCombs lives. This collection is framed by two sonnet sequences, the first about a slave guide and explorer at Mammoth Cave in the mid-1800s and the second about McCombs's experiences as a guide and park ranger there in the 1990s. Other poems deal with Mammoth Cave's four-thousand-year human history and the thrills of crawling into tight, rarely visited passageways to see what lies beyond. Often the poems search for oblique angles into personal experience, and the caves and the landscape they create form a 'personal geology'

Print version record

""Contents""; ""Foreword""; ""Acknowledgments""; ""I . ULTIMA THULE""; ""Candlewriting""; ""Star Chamber""; ""Visitations""; ""Bottomless Pit""; ""Echo River""; ""Shadow World""; ""Cartography""; ""Cave Formation""; ""Doctor Croghan""; ""Brush Fire""; ""Indian Mummy""; ""The Church""; ""Dripstone""; ""Tuberculosis Sanitarium""; ""Tours""; ""River""; ""The Others""; ""Fame""; ""Ultima Thule""; ""II. THE RIVER AND UNDER THE RIVER""; ""Ponds""; ""Salts Cave""; ""Cave Wind""; ""Moonbow""; ""Sinking Stream""; ""Floyd�s Lost Passage""; ""Kentucky""; ""April Fifth, Nineteen Hundred Eighty-Three""

""Watermelons""""Freemartin""; ""Flowstone""; ""The River and Under the River""; ""III. THE DARK COUNTY""; ""Dismantling the Cave Gate""; ""June""; ""Farming""; ""Broken Country""; ""Solution Cave""; ""Premonitions""; ""Comet Hale-Bopp""; ""Pushing a Lead""; ""Stephen Bishop�s Grave""; ""Cave Mummies""

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